I am looking for a new VPS and once again I think I am going to ditch Servint VPS in preference of a cheaper VPS. I know Servint is well known and they have a very good reputation here in this forum. I been longing to sign up with them but Lunarpages' offer looks very attractive.

Looking for more webhosting for different sites: I was wondering if anybody had any opinions on Midphase or Powweb please. I have researched them both throughly but would be interested to know what the latest opinions are on them.

I have had several accounts with Powweb for 5 years now and I thought I would write a brief review of them:

BEFORE

I originally went with Powweb 5 years ago based off of a referral from a friend. At the time, the “shared hosting environment” isn’t quite what it is today. For the first several years, I experienced trouble free hosting (for the most part) and truly felt as though I was “getting what I paid for.”

Powweb, back then, was a privately owned company based out of California ( I believe) and I usually got the impression that most of their employees truly cared about their customers and the quality of service they provided. What made them semi-unique at the time, was that they offered only a “one plan solution” (they didn’t offer multiple plan types) and the simplicity of their business model worked well for most.

Powweb was also unique in that they offered community forums which were pretty “open” and it truly allowed customers to discuss problems and issues with one another. A few years ago, they transitioned from private dedicated servers to a clustered environment and that did bring along some hard time, but they got it under control eventually. Overall, I was satisfied with the service.

NOW

A year or so ago Powweb was bought-out by Endurance. If you do not know anything about Endurance, they are a very large web-hosting company which has acquired several other large shared-hosts over the past few years.

Once Powweb was purchased by Endurance, the quality in service immediately decreased. Part of what Endurance does with most of their acquisitions is to assimilate them into their fold. This was a very shaky process and nearly everyone experience a large amount of downtime.

Additionally, Powweb is now plagued by horrible MySQL issues where the service is nearly completely useless. For the past year, Powweb has been either unable or unwilling to fix these issues. It can often take several minutes for even the most basic of queries to run. Any dynamic type of an application: forums, blogs, CMS, are usually rendered completely useless.

To make matters worse, Powweb continues to aggressively advertise these resource heavy applications and then ask for patience as they attempt to get their issues fixed. It has been about a year now, and still it is not resolved. Much of these issues come from the extreme overselling that Powweb does. Nearly every day, all websites (even static ones) come to a complete crawl.

Calling customer support is also a waste of your time. 95% of the time, you are met by a rude person who simply tells you “well, it seems to work for me” or that “we are aware of the problem” (at best). Opening support tickets is also usually not helpful. Tickets are often closed without any contact with the customer and it is very common for them to “give you the run-around.”

I have been told by support several times to keep an eye on the forums for updates on issues and whatnot. Then, if you go to the forums and attempt to get any information from there, you are told that ‘these are only user-helping user forums’ and that you can’t get any official help there, though customer support told you to go to that very place. Additionally, Powweb’s staff practices extreme censorship of the forum and it is common for negative remarks to be removed or posts completely deleted, many times without any acknowledgement of the act.

In addition to the MySQL issues, Powweb also experiences frequent “lock-ups,” CGI issues, email issues, dns issues, and so on and so forth. The list of problems that has occurred over the past year is literally too long to remember.

In conclusion, the Powweb of new is nothing like the Powweb of old. This new Powweb is controlled by an over-selling giant (Endurance) that is only concerned with the number of accounts as apposed to the quality of service. While certainly any business related site should not be in such an environment at all, I would even suggest that people looking for a host for hobby related purposes stay clear of powweb – it’s that bad.

Even though it is not mentioned anywhere on their web site, powweb billed me $8.77/mo instead of the advertised $7.77. I asked about this in their forum and that << removed >> Ian promptly deleted my post. Has anyone else heard about this?

I found out today that FatCow, Dot5 Hosting, PowWeb, and iPower Hosting are all part of the smae hosting conglomerate. The parent company is called Endurance International Group. It seems that the companies have gone out of their way to make their connections unpublished, which is very misleading to their customers. However, I recognized some similarities of their websites, and spoke with a representative over the phone who admitted that they were all connected. There are probably other companies too, but they wouldn't give out any more info.

I just registered a .info domain with GoDaddy for $0.99, and have the nameservers set up for Powweb, and my htaccess also setup; however, going to "mysite.info" works, but typing "www.mysite.info" does not work. I do not have this issue with any other of my domains. Any ideas?

I want to share my terrible experience with one of most famous hosting - Lunarpages.

I'm on Lunarpages (basic account) more than 3 months and I sent them few email that my server is often down.

Thay didn't want to move my accunt to some less overloaded server and send me each time automatic message

In order for us to investigate the issue, please capture three separate instances when the site is down and provide a Traceroute to the server for each instance. After we have documented three separate instances of the site being down we will be able to look into the situation and possibly offer you a server move...

So, thay asked me to sit next to computer and wait my site to be down and make traceroute.

I checked my email this morning and had a spam email from Lunar Pages (See below). Not only did they spam me, they obviously have a list which they used to spam others. Not only that, but anyone who received their spam email can reply back to the email and their email reply then is sent to everyone on their list.

Amazing.

Lunar Pages, I don't appreciate your spam emails. If you run your hosting business as well as you run your spam operations, then I am sure you will be out of business soon. That gives me some satisfaction.

I am trying to launch a website for a youth group. Since this is a non-profit organization I am trying to host the site for a reasonable price but I am not sure which company to go with. I have looked at lunarpages and 1&1. There are so many out there I am not sure which one to chose.Has anyone dealt with these companies and if so how are they?

From Me to Support I noticed that my inodes are set abnormally low to 200,000 we just upgraded to VPS plan per lunars request at we are at 160,000 on second day of operation on new vps server. From Sarwan singh Jassi to siteadmin(ME) When you reach 200,000 inodes you will need to upgrade to dedicated plan However and Email from the sales guy states the following. We do not force upgrades do to inodes, we just increase your inodes as you need them. Server crashes occur all the time about 1-3 times a month. Do not use lunar

They also run the old 90's upgrade scam, they claim your script utilize high resources for php, mysql.

After fighting with these people telling them that their server is configured incorrectly because we have load tested each and every script and that these scripts are used on 1000's of sites and the traffic we have does NOT warrent the useage they claim we went a head and upgraded per their recommendation.

So we get a brand new vps plan(see complaint above) and on the VPS server our usages look totally normal with proves they don't know what they are doing.

1. I have chosen Windows hosting from Lunarpages, I have hosted 3 websites in a shared hosting.

2. Among the three, 1 site is alexa 100K website, 2nd is an asp website which is under development, 3rd is a simple HTML site.

The "tortoise" support:

- Lunarpages doesnt provide a Chat support for any urgent issues!! Imagine if your site has gone down and you are losing 100$ because of that and you wanted to contact the support! Major hosting providers give Chat support so that the issues can be resolved immediately. But you must raise a ticket in lunarpages which will be responded within 24 hrs during business days !!!

Scenario 1:

Ok.. Some of you will feel that a support within 24 hrs is quite fine. But you know what happened to me in most of the cases when my site was down? - The customercare responded after 24 hrs asking me to provide the verification details.

Then I gave the details immediately but the customer care responded after 20 hrs asking for more information!!! and my site was still DOWN !!! They really dont seem to understand the criticality!

Scenario 2:

Once they have suspended my site and I received an automated mail that I must contact support to know why they have suspended it. I contacted them, BUT I KNOW THEY WILL ASK FOR VERIFICATION DETAILS and I proactively gave all the information in my ticket itself!!, but Surprisingly, I got the standard mail asking me to provide the verification details!!! I really got pissed off and replied back, which took one more 24 hrs. Then they replied back saying that there are a lot of visitors coming to my website and is affecting their server! But I have not exceeded the disk space, bandwidth,or whatsoever mentioned in the plan during the signup!!

They asked me to take a VPS or Dedicated hosting.

Then I had few arguments and finally agreed to take a VPS hosting and sent a mail to the customer care, but 3 days later they have suspended the site again saying that the account usage is more. I really doubt if the customer care reads the mails properly!! I have lost a lot of money due to this!!

I maintain a single blog in wordpress in the subdomain blog.e-healthgr.com. I continually had problems with their servers. They suspended my account without any logical reason. Their reasoning is that i overconsume resources. CPU usage: 6.49 MEM usage: 0.42 MySQL usage: 1.0 Top Process %CPU 64.0 php Top Process %CPU 56.0

We are talking here about a single blog in Wordpress. The theme was not mine but was one used by many blogs out there.

I find their excuses lame. My blog is neither wikipedia nor techcrunch to have such resources consumption. They are incapable of giving trustworthy support to a single blog in Wordpress.

They are asking me more money to move my blog in a dedicated server! Of course I am not going to give them any money for extra services plan.

Does anybody here now what legal actions i can take? They have occupated my account, i can not control my own data and they are not giving me the services which i paid for.

I've been helping a friend with a site hosted at Lunarpages for a few years, a very low traffic business site in a shared hosting account, no real complaints.

But 48 hours ago they got an odd email from Lunarpages describing the relocation of their server to a new datacenter, which involved 3-4 hours of downtime to drive the server from LA to San Diego, plus another hour or so of setup.

Now this was confusing because I thought that the internet was not a big truck -- it's a series of tubes, right? In fact, I thought that the whole point of the internet was not having to move your data by truck. But hey, this is an inexpensive shared account, so maybe Lunarpages does move all their data by truck. Kinda short notice on that, but okay, fine. A couple hours downtime. The website and email go dead at noon. The exact time was not announced in the notice, and mid-day mid-week seems like an odd time to deliberately schedule downtime, especially when it involves a long drive in traffic on the 5 freeway. But it is an inexpensive account, so... we wait.

And wait.

And wait.

Six hours later, we contact Lunarpages support asking what's up with the server. This being my friend's business website, business email, gone for most of the day. Was there an accident on the freeway? Did the truck driver get lost? Did the data end up in a cul-de-sac in Orange County? Were they stopped while making a run for the border?

An hour later, we finally hear back on the ticket -- Lunarpages hasn't heard from their "admins" (presumably due to a bad battery in their CB radio) but they hope to have things migrated "soon."So we wait.

Eleven hours after the site and email went down, we send a reply on the ticket asking a few more questions. 1) Any update on that migration? 2) Could you explain this whole deal with the truck driving the data from city to city? 3) Do you have any compensation for ridiculous downtime?An hour later, the Lunarpages reply: Migration done soon. Sorry for the inconvenience. No compensation at all, especially for "scheduled" downtime.

As of now, the server is still down and has been offline for about 14 hours. While I do hope the driver of the truck is okay, I have no such benevolent feelings for Lunarpages. When (if??) the site comes back up, we're transferring to a host that doesn't rely on the the LA freeway system to migrate their data. I hear there's this newfangled "network" thing the kids are in to. We'll probably try that out instead.

Lunarpages sure is cheap. And most of the time, they work okay. But you should probably avoid them if you value advance scheduling of downtime, rapid support, clear communication, or reliable access to your website and email.

I bought their hosting 8 months ago and they are simply jerk for hosting a big site on their shared hosting plans. Now I have transfered my domains to one.com which is very good for huge traffic sites.

I want to tell you guys about my lunarpages experience. First, I found them through a top 10 website review. BIG mistake I understand now. Not really that big of a deal if I can rely on them which is reall all I want. But I don't think I can.

First thing I did after creating my account was go to setup my email. I was very excited, this is my first domain ever. I set it up and then find out I can't receive email! After reporting this to their staff and setting up a ticket, I find out the next day that I wasn't receiving email because I had set my mailbox quota limit to 5000mb. Apparently that was too high they said! Why would they give you the option of doing that if it's just going to screw things up? That's just stupid. I knew I didn't need that much but I figured I'd set it and forget it and it would be no problem.

Then the next thing was just yesterday when I went to check my website and it was down. And so was their LPCP (control panel). I don't know how long it was down for but I noticed it for about half an hour.

I'm still within their 30 day refund policy since I only started the account on tuesday. What do you guys think I should do? Is it commomplace for websites to go down from time to time?

I would really appreciate any suggestions you guys might have as a reliable host. Also, how do I go about tranfering my domain name? Do i tell lunarpages I want to cancel first and then tranfer the domain or do I setup an account where I want to domain to go, then cancel?

I started off my website which consisted mainly of a Phpbb forum (Always running the latest version), a basic chatroom incorporated into the phpbb's mysql DB, and a few html pages with Yahoo Small Business. I found Yahoo to be terible after a while, so I moved to Lunarpages.

Everything went so smoothly and I was impressed by there custumer services, and everything had been running great over at Lunarpages..... Until last week....Apparently my "Top Process" is to high. A Php script consuming to much cpu/ram????

My forum Mysql DB is about 133Mib in size. It's pretty much untouched phpbb 3.0.2 forum apart from using a basic ajax chat for the last year or so.

It has 600 users, of which no more than 20 online at once. Posting about 100 posts per day.

The only thing that has changed since I signed up with LP is that my Mysql DB has grown by about 30MiB.

Ok, so fair enough if I have outgrown a shared server, but now they recomend I moved to a dedicated VPS.

I saw so happy using Cpanel but they tell me it isn't available on their VPS. I feel I'm going way out of my depth with a VPS. Is it hard for a total newb to use?

I am/have been using Servint for about a year. The service has been good no downtime. Lunar pages has recently become a client of mine and I thought being a small business owner that the right thing to do would be to switch.

I signed up with Lunarpages a while back for a dedicated server for my business. Good price, managed hosting rocks, decent disk space... little problem once with a huge power outage, but **** happens, cool.

All is well until I wake up this morning to an email a minute about a failed cron job. It smells fishy, so I contact LUnar pages support to see whats up.

They inform me that some asswad had managed to brute force into my server using a temporary account I set up a while back for some tech support. (I prefaced this with 'im an idiot', so no you know why)Either way, my server now has a rootkit, plus other **** im sure im not aware of... so they propose to move me to a brand new fresh box. im thinking they are gonna charge me a fee for this, a fee for that... no way. All is free of charge.

Im ****ting kittens now.

so im resetting everything up, and i manage to look myself out of my database...(i told you I was an idiot.. and this was a looooong day already)

they fix it. again. no problem...

If you are looking for a dedicated server, go to lunarpages. otherwise you are a freaking idiot as far as I am concerned... Lunarpages, I love you, I want your babies...

PS: I am in no way affiliated with lunarpages... however, if they want to give me a free year on their servers, i wouldnt complain... *hint hint*

This is a big company, that offers a lot of features for a relatively small price (with discounts readily available). They have a positive image. Customer service seems cheery. Unlimited storage and bandwidth is a definite plus. I signed up with them in November 2008, and mostly did not encounter problems with them until late July other than slow server access via my base from South America. Sign up and set up went relatively smooth. I had no major problems other than my page loading slowly, which I partly improved by making several adjustments to my Joomla site, but even after optimization the page still has its moments of slowness.

In an earlier post in this forum, I detailed the first issues. There were two main problems: one, my articles pages were showing up blank in PhP5, and two, I was unable to enter my Joomla Administrator at times. On the first issue, it turned out partly due to PhP5 not performing properly, and later, a plugin that should have been de-activated. The second issue, am still not sure, and its happening again.

One week ago, after just a few precious days of my site functioning normally, the bad luck poured on further still. I was hit this time by the NobodyCoder hacker. What an incredible coincidence of bad luck! Made me wonder, given the tone of some of my prior complaints, but then I did see that other Lunarpage customers were also hit on the same day as me, and some of them, on the same server.

Two days after the hacker struck, and no response to my emails, I finally got someone from Lunar to give me some time after I complained publicly in their forum page. A customer service supervisor took the unprecedented step of calling me.

First, though Lunarpages harps on its customers being at fault, through faulty scripts and such, I learned of some security measures that Lunarpages fails to inform its customers about that could conceivably help with such issues -- especially on shared servers -- such as the really helpful step of activating "suphp." When we were talking, the customer service rep was inside my Cpanel and I asked him if he would go ahead and make that change for me. He said he would do that, and that he was doing so while we talked. I was disappointed to see after the conversation that he had lied to me and had not make that change for me. Beyond this blatant display of dishonesty, I moreover pointed out to the customer service rep that I had read mod_security for Apache should be activated and configured -- he assured me that it was. I looked after our conversationm it in fact wasn't and that there was nothing about this to be found in their Knowledge base.

Concerning the hacker who messed up my site, it appears that multiple sites have been hit, particularly on my server. The customer service rep rightly agreed with me that this hack is obviously not targeting sites individually but sending it out en masse via a robot or program. Given that, and that many sites on my server have been hit, it would appear the hacker has found a way to exploit sites on their server (s). However, the response from Lunarpages support people again has so far has been mainly to tell people to do virus scans of their computers and change passwords, all of which helpful but likely don't do much to tackle the real issue.

The net result is that while the security issue appears to have been a broader, server wide security breakdown, the Lunarpages company has sidestepped any responsibility in the matter and done little to help customers get out of this mess. One wonders if it will happen again once my site goes back online (because of their slow server it took me about 3 days to upload the backup.) In general, though their customer service reps are generally polite, they react slowly to customer issues and often are completely ineffective.